XP rocks

I mean seriously. XP really rocks. At least, compared to my Vista box.

I couldn't take it anymore. Some days it would run fine for the whole day. Other times, every 30 minutes a blue screen of death, memory dump, reboot. No clue why. Could not figure out why. Finally got to the point where I just didn't give a shit why.

The only reason I had the machine was as my TV. I like Media Center. I really liked it on Vista. But not enough to keep Vista.

OK, so, I'll just revert. I tried to find a copy of MCE05 for my 4 core HP monsterbox but, alas, THERE ARE NO XP DRIVERS for this hot little baby. Vista only. Oh man. My most advanced piece of hardware, because of this Vista Trash on it, is effectively, useless.

So, I give up. I go to Newegg.com. I find an old 2006 MCE05 packing Media Center PC and I BUY The damn thing. It's not much more expensive than Vista Ultimate, so what the hell.

Oh My God. I'd forgotten how different XP was from Vista on my home TV watchin PC. It's faster. I mean, alot faster. Seems like, maybe, twice as fast.

Think about that. A 2006 2 core AMD against a 2007 Quad Core Intel chip with 150% of the memory. Twice as fast.

And copying from one hard drive to another... holy cow, it's... well, easy. No confirmation dialogs and 'you don't have privileges to do that' dialogs I have to decipher and then there's Clt/Alt/Del...

The TASK manager just comes up. Poof. Right there. No dimming of the screen and one, two or three 'is it ok to continue' dialogs.

I'd forgotten for a bit what it was like to just use my TV/computer in a way that was fast, simple and friendly. I am not trying to be sarcastic here. This is really what I'm sitting here thinking while using this XP based Media Center PC.

The only word I can think of is 'refreshing'. Now, imagine that. An OS that's what, 6 years old now that's, literally, twice as good as the latest version of the next version of the OS.

What the hell is Microsoft thinking?

No more PC's with Vista. I'm going Mac, Ubuntu or XP (preferably in that order) on all new machines in the future. The first question I'll have for any PC I buy from this day forward is: Does it have XP drivers? No? No thanks.

Goodnight Redmond, and good luck.